This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Those are two key reasons why, after a week of hyperactivity at venues scattered around the city, closing weekend for the eighth annual Luminato Festival arrives amid expectations that the best may be yet to come.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra will once again give a free outdoor performance, one of the closing events on the Luminato program. (Taku Kumabe for Luminato)

Ziggy Marley will perform at the Hub on Saturday. (Roxanne Haynes photo)

With sunny weather promised all weekend, the Hub may be the place to be for anyone who wants to combine musical bliss with drinking and eating outdoors. After last Saturday’s highly successful concert by The Roots, there’s one more not-free Hub event on the closing Saturday night, with tickets available for $35.

This time the star attraction is singer/songwriter Ziggy Marley, six-time Grammy winner and son of music icon Bob Marley.

Article Continued Below

If I Loved You — which will have its premiere at the beleaguered Sony Centre — was already a hot ticket, but the late addition of Carver to the lineup has made it for many of his followers the unmissable event of the season.

Subtitled “Gentlemen Prefer Broadway,” the show features love songs from Broadway musicals, with the novel twist that both the lovers and the loved ones in this are guys. Carver, the boy from Cranbrook, B.C., ranks as one of the most gifted Canadians ever to triumph in a Broadway musical. Two decades ago, he won the Tony as best actor in a musical for his unforgettably touching performance as Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

But oddly, and mostly by his own choice, Carver has rarely been back on Broadway since then. Instead he has chosen to live quietly in Ontario, being very selective about what offers he chooses to accept, and mostly avoiding the glare of the spotlight that goes along with international celebrity.

Later this month Carver will be in the cast of Company, Theatre 20’s revival of a Stephen Sondheim last staged locally 30 years ago. And it was with the help of Adam Brazier, chair of Theatre 20’s artistic board, that Carver was allowed to change his rehearsal schedule and appear in If I Loved You.

The playlist for the star-studded show has been kept secret, but when I chatted with Wainwright at the Hub the other night, he told me he’ll be singing two duets with Carver.

One of them is “Every Day a Little Death” from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. The other is “Old Fashioned Wedding” from Annie Get Your Gun.

The latter is intriguing for many reasons. It was not in the original 1946 Broadway production starring Ethel Merman or the 1950 MGM movie version. But when New York’s Lincoln Center revived the show in 1966 with Merman reprising one of her signature roles, Irving Berlin — whose original score was loaded with hit songs — was asked to write a new one. Berlin had more or less invented the American songbook with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, and went on to do many hugely successful scores for Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals. He was also the Jewish songwriter who wrote both of the world’s favourite gentile anthems, “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.”

Article Continued Below

“Wedding” was the last showstopper of his career.

When Rufus Wainwright was a child, he had dreams of playing the title role in the musical Annie. Now on Saturday, he will likely play another famous Broadway heroine named Annie, with Carver more likely to take the part of Annie Oakley’s rival and lover, Frank Butler.

“Old Fashioned Wedding” was heard 48 years ago at the same theatre, then known as the O’Keefe Centre. Ethel Merman sang it when the Lincoln Center revival had a two-week run in Toronto.

As for the revered Canadian composer John Weinzweig, the TSO is playing catch-up, having neglected to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2013, even while paying a lot of attention to British composer Benjamin Britten, also born in 1913.

Now for the third consecutive year, Luminato is giving Toronto audiences a rare, free outdoor TSO concert. And Weinzweig’s The Barn Dance represents Canada on the playbill along with composers from Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.A. That’s because the evening is conceived as a musical travelogue touring the Western hemisphere in anticipation of Toronto’s hosting the Pan Am Games in July 2015.

The Barn Dance — part of a longer piece called The Red Ear of Corn — was commissioned by the Volkoff Ballet in 1949, and it’s his most performed work.

It was first played during the peak of McCarthy hysteria about the Communist menace. Once while crossing the U.S. border, Weinzweig was stopped and interrogated about his political sympathies. The U.S. authorities asked him whether it was true he had written a piece of music called The Red Ear of Corn.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com